Nigeria’s economy is about 30 per cent larger than previously thought after the west African nation updated the method by which GDP is calculated, the first rejigging of its statistical model in more than a decade.
Nigeria’s 2024 GDP now stands at N372.82tn ($244bn) at current prices, up from the $187.76bn estimated by the World Bank, after the country’s National Bureau of Statistics changed the base year from 2010 to 2019. This was done to account for previously excluded sectors such as a booming digital services industry, pension funds and the informal labour market, which employs most Nigerian residents.
Emerging market economies are encouraged by development experts to regularly rebase their economies to better capture the size of their national output and produce economic data reflective of their nascent economies.